Murdered Soul Suspect Review

Murdered Soul Suspect starts off with a bang, or more accurately, a crash. Detective Ronan O’Connor is thrown out of an upstairs(4th floor I believe) window of an apartment building in Salem, Massachusetts. O’Connor was pursuing the a vicious serial killer known only as The Bell Killer. The multi-story fall didn’t kill O’Connor, as The Bell Killer makes his way downstairs and finishes the detective off with several shots from his own gun.

As he’s about to pass over, O’Connor is greeted by his dead wife Julia. Julia informs him that he can’t come spend eternity with her yet, not until he finishes his leftover business. Dejected, O’Connor determines he must solve his murder before he can pass on and gets started with his investigation. We had already got a little bit of intro tutorial when O’Connor had hit the street after his fall, and after the meeting with Julia we get that finished up. What follows is looking for clues, possessing the living, meeting ghosts and mediums, and trying to sneak up on demons.

Is it all as awesome as it sounds? Is it all just a huge letdown? How is a dead guy supposed to catch a killer? Why did I waste my time trying to play Enemy Front when I could have been playing this a little more and/or working on this review a couple weeks ago? Am I just asking random questions to pad my word count? Let’s find out.

Graphically there’s nothing too much to complain about here. Not the greatest looking game in the world, I personally think Watch_Dogs was more realistic looking, but Murdered is a little more… crisp, more sharp I guess you could say. Some things in the game look a little better than others, the most notable I’ll get to later on.

The audio is very well done. Musical score fits where it needs to. Voice acting and script are really good, as are the sound effects. Very nice job of progressing the story during cut scenes and investigations. Again, not very much to complain about here.

Gameplay in Murdered Soul Suspect is mostly a lot of walking around, examining things, and piecing together clues, so there isn’t a lot of controls to try to remember or fast paced button mashing. Most of the time you will get a prompt on what button you need to push. You’re going to be spending a lot of time “possessing” the living, listening to their thoughts, eavesdropping on conversations and influencing their actions.

Getting around isn’t too difficult for the most part, except for having to find an open door or window in order to enter buildings. In fact, the only thing that will really get in your way are demons and demon pits. Unfortunately, the demons are the biggest downside to the game in my opinion. Not because they are incredibly difficult to defeat, but because they look terrible. Everything else I encountered looked pretty good, but the demons were just…bad. Only way to defeat them is sneak up from behind and follow the button prompt. But if they see you, you have to run and hide in these pockets just floating in the air.

I think the game said something about ghost residue or something like that during a tutorial portion about it. And you have to keep jumping back and forth between these pockets until the demon loses track of you, and then loses interest and goes back to it’s patrol. Not too difficult at all, but they can get a little annoying.

There’s a lot to like here from what I’ve encountered. Graphics are good, aside from the demons. Dialogue flows pretty smoothly. Story is interesting, albeit far-fetched, but this is a video game after all. From everything I came across during my playing of the game, I have to say that I am pretty well satisfied with my purchase.

Honestly, the only thing that I can really point to as bad is those demons. Just about everything else in the game that I’ve seen thus far looks pretty good, but the demons just look kind of bush league. I know combat can be fairly limited when you’re dealing with a ghost detective game, but I also think that the combat controls could have been handled a little better.

You know how sometimes you’ll play a game, and for the most part you really dig it, but a couple of little things really hold it back more than they probably should? That’s the situation I’ve run into here. From everything positive I’ve written about Murdered: Soul Suspect, this should probably be a 4 star game. But, with how much the demons irk me, I’m going to have to give this 3 stars.

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1 Comment on Murdered Soul Suspect Review

Good review; sounds like a nice game (and the stream I watched a little of certainly looked decent).

A real shame that Airtight Games had so much riding on this project and ended up closing just a month after releasing it. They may not have been delivering fantastic games, but they definitely had some of the more interesting ideas and concepts (this and Dark Void spring to mind right off the bat).